We Counter Hate

One of the most fascinating examples of social innovation Ive been tracking recently was the We Counter Hate platform, by Seattle-based agency POSSIBLE (now part of Wunderman Thompson Seattle) that sought to reduce hate speech on Twitter by turning retweets of these hateful messages into donations for a good cause.

Heres how it worked: Using machine learning, it first identified hateful speech on the platform. A human moderator then selected the most offensive and most dangerous tweets and attached an undeletable reply, which informed recipients that if they retweet the message, a donation will be committed to an anti-hate group. In a beautiful twist this non-profit wasLife After Hate, a group that helps members of extremist groups leave and transition to mainstream life.

Unfortunately (and ironically) on the very day I reached out to the team, Twitter decided to allow users to hide replies in their feeds in an effort to empower people faced with bullying and harassment, eliminating the reply function which was the main mechanism that gave #WeCounterHate its power and led to it being able to remove more than 20M potentialhatespeech impressions.

Undeterred, I caught up with some members of the core teamShawn Herron, Jason Carmel and Matt Gilmoreto find out more about their journey.

(From left to right)Shawn Herron, Experience Technology Director @ Wunderman ThompsonMatt ... [+] Gilmore, Creative Director @ Wunderman ThompsonJason Carmel, Chief Data Officer @ Wunderman Thompson

Afdhel Aziz: Gentlemen, welcome. How did the idea for WeCounterHate come about?

Shawn Herron: It started when we caught wind of what the citizens of the town of Wunsiedel, Germany were doing to combat the annual extremists that were descending on their town every year to hold rally and march through the streets. The towns people had devised a peaceful way to upend the extremists efforts by turning their hateful march into an involuntary walk-a-thon that benefitted EXIT Deutschland, an organization that helps people escape extremist groups. For every meter the neo Nazis marched 10 euro would be donated to Exit Deutschland. The question became, how can we scale something like that so anyone, anywhere, could have the ability to fight against hate in a meaningful way?

Jason Carmel: We knew that, to create scale, it had to be digital in nature and Twitter seemed like the perfect problem in need of a solution. We figured if we could reduce hate on a platform of that magnitude, even a small percentage, it could have a big impact. We started by developing an innovative machine-learning and natural-language processing technology that could identify and classify hate speech.

Matt Gilmore: But we still needed the mechanic, a catch 22, that would present those looking to spread hate on the platform with a no-win decision to make. Thats when we stumbled onto the fact that Twitter didnt allow people to delete comments on their tweets. The only way to remove a comment was to delete the post entirely. That mechanic is what gave us a way put a permanent marker, in the form of an image and message, on tweets containing hate speech. Its that permanent marker that let those looking to retweet, and spread hate, know that doing so would benefit an organization theyre opposed to, Life After Hate. No matter what they chose to do, love wins.

Aziz: Fascinating. So, what led you to the partnership with Life After Hate and how did that work?

Carmel: Staffed and founded by former hate group members and violent extremists, Life After Hate is a non-profit that helps people in extremist groups break from that hate-filled lifestyle. They offer a welcoming way out thats free of judgement.We collaborated with them in training the AI thats used to identify hate speech in near real time on Twitter. With the benefit of their knowledge our AI can even find hidden forms of hate speech (coded language, secret emoji combinations) in a vast sea of tweets. Their expertise was crucial to align the language we used when countering hate, making it more compassionate and matter-of-fact, rather than confrontational.

Herron: Additionally, their partnership just made perfect sense on a conceptual level as the beneficiary of the effort. If youre one of those people looking to spread hate on Twitter, youre much less likely to hit retweet knowing that youll be benefiting an organization youre opposed to.

Aziz: Was it hard to wade through that much hate speech? What surprised you?

Herron: Being exposed to all the hate filled tweets was easily the most difficult part of the whole thing. The human brain is not wired to read and see the kinds of messages we encountered for long periods of time. At the end of the countering process, after the AI identified hate, we always relied on a human moderator to validate it before countering/tagging it. We broke up the shifts between many volunteers, but it was always quite difficult when it was your shift.

Carmel: We learned that the identification of hate speech was much easier than categorizing it. Or initial understanding of hate speech, especially before Life After Hate helped us, was really just the movie version of hate speech and missed a lot of hidden context. We were also surprised at how much the language would evolve relative to current events. It was definitely something we had to stay on top of.

We were surprised by how broad a spectrum of people the hate was coming from. We went in thinking wed just encounter a bunch of thugs, but many of these people held themselves out as academics, comedians, or historians. The brands of hate some of them shared were nuanced and, in an insidious way, very compelling.

We were caught off guard by the amount of time and effort those who disliked our platform would take to slam or discredit it. A lot of these people are quite savvy and would go to great lengths to attempt to undermine our efforts. Outside of the things we dealt with in Twitter, one YouTube hate-fluencer made a video, close to an hour long, that wove all sorts of intricate theories and conspiracies about our platform.

Gilmore: We were also surprised by how wrong our instincts were. When we first started, the things we were seeing made us angry and frustrated. We wanted to come after these hateful people in an aggressive way. We wanted to fight back. Life After Hate was essential in helping course-correct our tone and message. They helped us understand (and wed like more people to know) the power of empathy combined with education, and its ability to remove walls rather than build them between people. It can be difficult to take this approach, but it ultimately gets everyone to a better place.

Aziz: I love that idea - empathy with education.What were the results of the work youve done so far? How did you measure success?

Carmel: The WeCounterHate platform radically outperformed expectations of identifying hate speech (91% success) relative to a human moderator, as we continued to improve the model over the course of the project.

When @WeCounterHatereplied to a tweet containing hate, it reduces the spread of that hate by an average of 54%. Furthermore, 19% of the "hatefluencers" deleted their original tweet outright once it had been countered.

By our estimates, the Hate Tweets we countered were shared roughly 20 million fewer times compared to similar Hate Tweets by the same authors that werent countered.

Matt: It was a pretty mind-bending exercise for people working in an ad agency, that have spent our entire careers trying to gain exposure for the work do on behalf of clients, to suddenly be trying to reduce impressions. We even began referring to WCH as the worlds first reverse-media plan, designed to reduce impressions by stopping retweets.

Aziz: So now that the project has ended, how do you hope to take this idea forward in an open source way?

Herron: Our hope was to counter hate speech online, while collecting insightful data about how hate speech online propagates. Going forward, hopefully this data will allow experts in the field to address the hate speech problem at a more systemic level. Our goal is to publicly open source archived data that has been gathered, hopefully next quarter (Q1 2020)

I love this idea on so many different levels. The ingenuity of finding a way to counteract hate speech without resorting to censorship. The partnership with Life After Hate to improve the sophistication of the detection. And the potential for this same model to be applied to so many different problems in the world (*anyone want to build a version for climate change deniers?). It proves that the creativity of the advertising world can truly be turned into a force for good, and for that I salute the team at Possible for showing whats, well, possible.

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The Power Of Purpose: How We Counter Hate Used Artificial Intelligence To Battle Hate Speech Online - Forbes

Artificial Intelligence (AI) has always been a topic of discussion- is it good enough for us? Getting more and more into this high technology world will give us a better future or not? According to recent research, almost everyone has a different requirement for automation. And most of the work of humans is done by the latest high intelligence computers. You all must be familiar with the fact of how Artificial Intelligence is changing industries, like Medicine, Automobiles, and Manufacturing. Well, what about Architecture?

The main issue is about the fact that these high tech robots will actually replace the creator? Although these high tech computers are not good enough at some ideas and you have to rely on Human Intelligence for that. However, these can be used to save a lot of time by doing some time-consuming tasks, and we can utilize that time in creating some other designs.

Artificial Intelligence is a high technology mechanical system that can perform any task but needs a few human efforts like visual interpretation or design-making etc. AI works and gives the best results possible by analyzing tons of data, and thats how it can excel in architecture.

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While creating new designs, architects usually go through past designs and the data prepared throughout the making of the building. Instead of investing a lot of time and energy to create something new, it is alleged that a computer will be able to analyze the data in a short time period and will give recommendations accordingly. With this, an architect will be able to do testing and research simultaneously and sometimes even without pen and paper. It seems like it will lead to the organizations or the clients to revert to computers for masterplans and construction.

However, the value of architects and human efforts of analyzing a problem and finding the perfect solutions will always remain unchallenged.

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Parametric architecture is a hidden weapon that allows an architect to change specific parameters to create various types of output designs and create such structures that would not have been imagined earlier. It is like an architects programming language.

It allows an architect to consider a building and reframe it to fit into some other requirements. A process like this allows Artificial Intelligence to reduce the effort of an architect so that the architect can freely think about different ideas and create something new.

Constructing a building is not a one-day task as it needs a lot of pre-planning. However, this pre-planning is not enough sometimes, and you need a little bit of more effort to get an architects opinion to life. Artificial Intelligence will make an architects work significantly easier by analyzing the whole data and creating models that can save a lot of time and energy of the architect.

All in all, AI can be called an estimation tool for various aspects while constructing a building. However, when it comes to the construction part, AI can help so that human efforts become negligible.

The countless hours of research at the starting of any new project is where AI steps in and makes it easy for the architect by analyzing the aggregate data in millisecond and recommending some models so that the architect can think about the conceptual design without even using the pen or paper.

Just like while building a home for a family, if you have the whole information about the requirements of the family, you can simply pull all zoning data using AI and generate design variations in a short time period.

This era of modernization demands everything to be smartly designed. Just like smart cities, todays high technology society demands smart homes. However, now architects do not have to bother about how to use AI to create the designs of home only, but they should worry about making the users experience worth paying.

Change is something that should never change. The way your city looks today will be very different in the coming time. The most challenging task for an architect is city planning that needs a lot of precision planning. However, the primary task is to analyze all the possible aspects, and understand how a city will flow, how the population is going to be in the coming years.

All these factors are indicating one thing only, i.e., the future architects will give fewer efforts in the business of drawing and more into satisfying all the requirements of the user with the help of Artificial Intelligence.

Read More: How AI and Automation Are Joining Forces to Transform ITSM

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How is Artificial Intelligence (AI) Changing the Future of Architecture? - AiThority

tech2 News StaffDec 26, 2019 17:21:10 IST

Samsung has been teasing Neon for quite a while on social media. It appears to be an artificial intelligence (AI) project by its research arm and the company will be announcing more details about it during CES 2020 in January.

Samsung Neon AI project. Image: Neon

Neon hasnt really revealed any details. Its being developed under Samsung Technology & Advanced Research Labs (STAR Labs). STAR Labs could be a reference to the Scientific and Technological Advanced Research Laboratories (STAR Labs) from DC Comics, but we cant confirm that. Samsungs research division is led by Pranav Mistry who earlier worked on the Samsung Galaxy Gear and is now the President and CEO of STAR Labs.

The company has set up a website with a landing page that doesnt really mention any details. It only has a message saying, Have you ever met an Artificial? It has been continuously posting images on Twitter and Instagram, including a couple of videos. These images contain the same message in different languages as well, indicating that the AI has multilingual functionality. Mistry has also been teasing Neon on his own Twitter account.

This wont be Samsungs first venture into AI since it already has the Bixby digital assistant. However, it never really took off. CES 2020 begins on 7 January and well get to know more about Neon during the expo.

Find latest and upcoming tech gadgets online on Tech2 Gadgets. Get technology news, gadgets reviews & ratings. Popular gadgets including laptop, tablet and mobile specifications, features, prices, comparison.

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Samsung to announce its Neon artificial intelligence project at CES 2020 - Firstpost

The US is far ahead of everyone else but China is keen on taking the lead, soon. Source: Shutterstock

IN THE digital age, countries all around the world are racing to excel with artificial intelligent (AI) technology.

The phenomenon is not a surprise considering that that AI is undeniably a powerful solution with elaborate enterprise use across industries from medical algorithms to autonomous vehicles.

For a while now, the US has been dominating the global race in AI development and capabilities, but according to the Global AI Index, it seems like China will be dominating the field in the near future.

As the first runner up, it is expected that China will overtake the US in about 5 to 10 years, based on the countrys impressive growth records.

Based on 7 key indicators such as research, infrastructure, talent, development, operating environment, commercial ventures, and government strategy measured over the course of 12 months it looks like China is promoting growth unlike any other.

Although the US is prominently in the lead by a great margin, China has already materialized efforts to establish a bigger influence based on the countrys Next Generation Artificial Intelligence Development Plan which it launched in 2017.

Not only that, it is reported that China alone has promised to spend up to US$22 billion a mammoth figure compared to the global governmental AI spending estimated at US$35 billion throughout the next decade or so.

Nevertheless, China must recognize some areas that it needs to improve in order to successfully lead with AI.

Recording a 58.3 percent on the index, China seems to lack in terms of talent, commercial ventures, research quality, and private funding.

However, the country has still shown significant growth in various other areas. especially in the contribution of AI code. According to the worlds biggest open-source development platform, Github, China developers have contributed 13,000 AI codes to date.

This is a big jump compared to the initial count of 150 in 2015. The US, however, is still in the lead with a record of 42,000 contributions.

The need to dominate the AI market seems to be the motivation for countries around the world as the technology is a defining asset that can shift the dynamics of the global economy.

Other prominent countries to watch out for are the UK, Canada, and Germany, ranking 3rd, 4th, and 5th place consecutively.

Another Asian country making a mark in the 7th spot is Singapore, promoting a high score in talent but room for improvement in terms of its operative environment.

Despite the quick progress, experts hope that all countries looking to excel in AI will do so with ethical considerations and strategic leadership in mind.

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Who will really dominate artificial intelligence capabilities in the future? - Tech Wire Asia

With a view to promoting enterprises working on artificial intelligence solutions and taking leadership in this emerging technology space, the Telangana government has decided to observe 2020 as the Year of AI.

Telangana IT Minister KT Rama Rao will formally make the announcement on January 2 here, declaring 2020, the Year of AI, and release a calendar of events for the next 12 months.

The event will see signing of memorandum of agreements between the government and AI start-ups.

The Information and Technology Ministry is in the process of preparing a document with strategy framework to offer incentives exclusive to the AI initiatives.

We have come up with such documents for Blockchain and drones. With new technologies such as AI and Big Data Analytics expected to generate 8 lakh jobs in the country in the next two years, we will launch a dedicated programme for AI in 2020, Jayesh Ranjan, Principal Secretary, IT and Industries, Government of Telangana, has said.

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For Telangana, 2020 will be year of artificial intelligence - BusinessLine

"The amount of underpayment occurring now is so large that there is an effect on wages generally and on making life difficult for law-abiding employers."

Senator Sheldon said artificial intelligence could be used to detect discrepancies in payment data held by the Australian Taxation Office on employers in industries such as retail, hospitality, agriculture and construction.

"You could do it for wages and superannuation, with an algorithm used as a first flag for human intervention," he said.

The problems of underpayment are systemic and not readily resolvable just by strong law enforcement - even though that's vital.

Alistair Muir, chief executive of Sydney-based consultancy Vanteum, said it was possible to "train artificial intelligence algorithms across multiple data sets to detect wage theft as described by Senator Sheldon, without ever needing to move, un-encrypt or disclose the data itself".

Melbourne University associate professor of computing Vanessa Teague said a "simple computer program" could be designed to detect evidence of wage underpayment using the rules laid out in the award system, but that any such project should safeguard workers' privacy by requiring informed consent.

Industrial Relations Minister Christian Porter did not rule out introducing data matching as part of his wage theft crackdown and said workplace exploitation "will not be tolerated by this government".

Mr Porter said the government accepted "in principle" the recommendations of the migrant worker taskforce which included taking a "whole of government" approach and giving the Fair Work Ombudsman expanded information gathering powers.

The taskforce report said inter-governmental information sharing was "an important avenue" for identifying wage under payment and could be used to "support successful prosecutions".

In the latest case of alleged wage underpayment in the hospitality industry, the company behind the Crown casino eatery fronted by celebrity chef Heston Blumenthal, Dinner by Heston, this week applied to be wound up after failing to comply with a statutory notice requiring it to back pay staff for unpaid overtime.

It follows revelations of underpayments totalling hundreds of millions of dollars by employers including restauranteur George Calombaris' Made Establishment, Qantas, Coles, Commonwealth Bank, Bunnings, Super Retail Group and the Australian Broadcasting Corporation.

Professional services firm PwC has estimated that employers are underpaying Australian workers by $1.4 billion a year, affecting 13 per cent of the nation's workforce.

AI Group chief executive Innes Willox said the employer peak body did not "see a need" for increased governmental data collection powers.

Australian Retail Association president Russell Zimmerman said retailers were not inherently opposed to data matching as employers who paid workers correctly had "nothing to fear" but was unsure how effective or accurate the approach would be.

"We don't support wage theft," Mr Zimmerman said.

He blamed the significant underpayments self-reported in recent months on difficulties navigating the "complex" retail award.

Senator Sheldon rejected this argument, saying the system was "only complicated if you don't want to pay".

"You get paid for eight hours, then after that you get overtime and you get weekend penalty rates," he said.

Australian Council of Trade Unions assistant secretary Liam OBrien said the workplace law system was "failing workers who are suffering from systemic wage theft".

The minister, who is consulting unions and business leaders on the detail of his wage theft bill including what penalty should apply if employers fail to prevent accidental underpayment said the draft legislation should be released "early in the new year".

Dana is health and industrial relations reporter for The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age.

Originally posted here:

Fels backs calls to use artificial intelligence as wage-theft detector - The Age

Doxtros AI mission is to deliver personalised healthcare better, faster and economically for every individual. It has been designed around a doctors brain to understand and recognize the unique way that humans express their symptoms.

How has Doxtro brought a change in Artificial Intelligence (AI) in the field of medicine?Our AI feature asks questions to the user so that the doctors can understand the health concerns of patients better. The feature provides valuable insights to the doctor through inputs gathered from patients before they go for a consultation. The primary insights provided are based on how patients express symptoms, patients medical history and current symptoms and machine learning into the demography based health issues and not to prescribe medicines or medical advice.

How will this app help a patient who is unable to read or write?The apps user flow is designed in such a way that the patients can get connected to a doctor through a voice call with basic chatting ability by just typing their health concern simply in the free text box. The users can continue to chat or choose to connect through a voice call. Languages supported at the moment are Hindi and English. With the basic knowledge of these two languages, we made sure that the user can use the app through voice mode and consult a doctor.

Is there a feedback system in your app?Yes, we give the highest priority to users feedback and doctors as well. Users can rate and write reviews about the doctor in the app itself once the consultation is completed. We also follow a proactive process on the feedback system. Our customer engagement executives are assigned to collate regular user feedback, document the same and action it respective functional teams internally. This is being done, because, in general, not all users will come forward to write a review, whether it is a good or bad experience. We consider this feedback seriously to improve our quality of care.

How frequently can a patient contact the doctor through your app?There are no restrictions in terms of access to the doctor in the app. The users can also add their family members, facilitate consultations with doctors and store their respective health records in the app. Currently, we offer 12 specialisations, general physician, dermatologists, cardiologists, gynaecologists, paediatricians, sexologists, diabetologists, psychologists, psychiatrists, nutritionists, dentists and gastroenterologists.

The users may have various health issues and may have varying need to connect with different specialists at different times. Based on their need, they can contact any available specialists, n number of times. Post the consultation, the window is open for 48 hours for free follow up questions with the same doctor for the users to clarify any doubts.

How is Doxtro different from other healthcare apps that use AI?What distinguishes our technology is the fact that it has been designed around a doctors brain to understand and recognize the unique way that humans express their symptoms. Doxtro AI works with two major roles in the system. Data aspect of the AI which drives the ability to do self-diagnosis and Machine Learning (ML) aspect to assist with triage. Doxtro puts patients at the centre of care, AI-assisted conversations help the patient describe symptoms, understands it and offer information to ensure the patient understands their condition and connects the right specialist.

Doxtro AI asks smart questions about patients symptoms while also considering their age, gender, and medical history. The AI in our app is used to help users understand their health issues and to choose the right doctor. All this is accomplished by ML and natural language processing technologies that we use.

How do doctors benefit from this app?Our AI engine provides great insights to the physicians to understand the patients health issues better, thus saving their valuable time and ensuring doctors focus on doctoring. Doxtro AI puts together a patients response history to ensure that the doctor has context, along with this, augmented diagnostics help to translate symptoms into potential conditions based on patients conversation with the AI and saves the time of doctors for a better diagnosis of the patients health condition.

This supports the doctors to reach out to larger people in need especially considering the shortage of qualified doctors in India. Our app enhances their practice especially with smart tools like AI, excellent workflow and ease of use.

How long has the app been there for and what exactly is your user base?Doxtro app has been in the market for more than 18 months and we have a registered user base of more than 2 Lacs as of now.

What kind of patterns have you noticed in patients?We see a lot of people adapting to the online consultation, especially the ones who need the right qualified and verified doctors. Lot more people resort to proactive wellness than illness. Doxtro's main focus is in wellness and having the right qualified and verified doctors on board. So we see increasing trends of people using Doxtro mobile app.

As per the Security and Data Privacy policy, we do not have any access to any patients' data. All the voice or chat interactions are fully encrypted and the entire application is hosted in the cloud. Hence, we won't be able to arrive at any patterns.

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AI-based health app: Putting patients first - ETHealthworld.com

Fear surrounding artificial intelligence has remained prevalent as society has witnessed the mass leaps the technology sector has made in recent years. Shadow Robot Company Director, Rich Walker explained it is not evil A.I. people should necessarily be afraid of but rather the companies they masquerade behind. During an interview with Express.co.uk, Mr Walker explained advanced A.I. that had nefarious intent for mankind would not openly show itself.

He noted companies that actively do harm to society and people within them would be more appealing to A.I. that had goals of destroying humanity.

He said: There is the kind of standard fear of A.I. that comes from science fiction.

Which is either the humanoid robot, like from the Terminator, takes over and tries to destroy humanity.

Or it is the cold compassionless machine that changes the world around it in its own image and there is no space for humans in there.

DON'T MISS:Elon Musk issues terrifying prediction on 'AI robot swarms'

There is actually quite a good argument that there are cold compassionless machines that change the world around us in their own image.

They are called corporations.

We shouldnt necessarily worry about A.I as something that will come along and change everything.

We already have these organisations that will do that.

They operate outside of national rules of laws and societal codes of conduct.

So, A.I. is not the bit that makes that happen, the bits that make that happen are already in place.

He later added: I guess you could say that a company that has known for 30 years that climate change was inevitable and has systematically defunded research into climate change and funded research that shows climate change isnt happening is the kind of organisation I am thinking of.

That is the kind of behaviour you have to say: That is trying to destroy humanity.

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They would argue no they are not trying to do that but the fact would be the effects of what you are doing is trying to destroy humanity.

If you wanted to have an Artificial Intelligence that was a bad guy, a large corporation that profits from fossil fuels and systematically hid the information that fossil fuels were bad for the planet, that would be an A.I bad guy in my book.

The Shadow Robot Company has directed there focus on creating complex dexterous robot hands that mimicked humans hands.

The robotics company uses tactical Telerobot technology to demonstrate how A.I programmes can be used alongside human interaction to create complex robotic relationship.

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AI Warning: Compassionless world-changing A.I. already here -You WONT see them coming - Express.co.uk